Konecni developed custom scenarios and synthetic data sets, including multiple mini-challenges, based on a hypothetical pandemic outbreak involving a rapidly evolving fictitious virus. After analyzing the data sets made possible by his scenarios, Konecni presented a series of recommendations, to “enable the design of scenarios that push the forefront of visual analytics research relevant to real-world biomedical research problems.”

Prof. Grinstein noted that Konecni's work “integrates not just biological and chemical knowledge, but also modeling and computer science to solve extremely complex problems including for example bioterrorism and drug discovery. Whereas most work is often done as prototypes that provide examples of the research, his work has been immediately used both by Pfizer and analysts around the world. He has handled this pressure quite well, and his work is broad and superb.”